Here comes the voice of reason from an average joe monkey coder so take it for what it is.
Out of these great choices, which one is the easiest solution from a coding perspective that wonāt generate a defensive coding paradigm or spark incessant bitching from the WTF people?
Do that one.
Better yet the ātopic hotness widgetā already exists and we all understand it (like when I click your picture I get the main topic and your responses minus all others). So the best option is to do nothing and keep that functionality status quo.
Oh, I am so looking forward to this. If you can implement it, and the expandable progress bar well, thatās one of my major gripes fixed with Discourse.
Activity based navigation seems the best idea. Definitely makes more sense than standard pagination (and Iām from TDWTF so thatās saying something).
If possible, I would also include āsignificant eventsā, from the hotness heatmap idea. So imagine an asymmetrical activity based timeline, within which you have clickable hotlinks to the most prominent posts in the thread.
You can even allow the moderators / power users / most active posters promote individual posts into the timeline. For example, someone derails the thread in a community where such thing doesnāt trigger branching into a separate thread (like, say, TDWTF). The derailment post is significant, but (for whatever reason) doesnāt generate enough likes to get into the map. In that case, someone should be able to click and make it a ālandmark postā or whatever itād be called.
OK, now that vertical timeline is merged into master, this is worth some consideration for future versions. What all should be highlighted in the timeline?
I could see āgapsā shown as small gaps in the blue line (that is, wherever a āx intervals laterā marker would be inserted in the post stream, make a little gap in the blue line too).
This is the only one I personally care about. I can think of numerable occasions when Iāve reached the end of a topic where I see that apparently Iāve bookmarked something in here, but Iāve no idea where that post is.
Having the possibility of enabling any of this other stuff with plugins would be great - we know our game communities would love a āfamous people postsā for instance - but each communityās preference could vary greatly.ĀØ
But hey, what happened to breakpoints and chapters?
Weāre suddenly talking about any kind of timeline gimmick here. This topic started out trying to solve a very specific problem: Mega-topics.
I agree. Iām having a hard time mocking up something that makes perfect sense though. Iāll try dig around on Boingboing now that the Timeline is live there. Iāve yet to experience a mega-topic that made me go āsomething is very broken hereā (though I did notice some tiny glitches that Iāll report in the other topic).
Pretty sure thereās a keyboard shortcut for that, isnāt there @sam? I guess not? Maybe there should be, though? It feels like power user stuff to me. Everyone else would just visit their bookmarks page and click through from thereā¦ no wondering needed.
Solution is the same: show me the most liked posts in the timeline. Thatās very likely where the most interesting stuff in the conversation is. I also think showing significant gaps by subtle little breaks in the timeline per @mcwumbly is an excellent suggestion, though I donāt necessarily want to do it in this release.
Might just be my high activity level on a Like-less forum, but Iām not sure thatās necessarily the best of the aforementioned breakpointsāespecially since, as I understand it, those are the posts most likely to show up in the Summarized View, anyway, right?
I almost wonder if something akin to a āsliding scaleā for the timeline slider might be valuableāincrease its āsensitivityā around areas of high post-activity, decrease it so it moves a little faster along areas of low activity (probably needs to include a rough date/time indicator to help elucidate whatās happening). Possibly even color variation as you scroll into high-activity areas.
Iām thinking of something like, say, a thread dedicated to a beloved, long-running TV show. During the summer and winter breaks, activity peters off, with news posts only showing up every couple of weeks as, say, casting news or cancellation rumors bubble up. As the premier nears, or in the aftermath of a particularly momentous episode, posting increases massively, and if Iām moving through the huge thread of a show way after the fact, Iād find it interesting to sorta be able to pinpoint these āinflection pointsā in its discussion easily. Especially if the sheer volume of posting during those moments prevents any single post from accruing a critical mass of Likes.
(To that last point, again, having spent precious little time on Like-heavy forums, I may have a skewed perception of how useful that metric would be for finding conversational turning points)
I donāt know how well it would translate, but I like the idea of some type of āheat map / cold mapā indicator for posts similar to topics in topic lists.
I think it would need to be subtle almost to the point of being unnoticeable to not cause a potentially annoying visual āflashingā during rapid movement.
But AFAIK a lot of post data is already there so it might be doable.
Iām not sure how ādragā and āslipā based on clustering of post dates would work, but I like that idea too.
A problem being that the timeline is dual purpose.
On one hand it provides an indication of where one is in the topic and moves as the page moves.
On the other it serves a a way to move the page. as the slider is moved.
That is, the page moves the slider and the slider moves the page.
Here are some visual ideas for an activity map (posts per period), large breaks in time and most-liked posts.
It feels like thereās wasted space to the right of the line, but I donāt see how you can put any other UI elements there without them being obscured by the sliding date.
or maybe have a more dynamic indicator to show the āhotnessā of a topic, like this drupal module does. It shows a color gauge for āhotnessā of a topic, which has some decay settings and other parameters which change the color based on clicks, views, etc.
Like this. Could include bookmarks. The chapters could be breaks in the line.
A fuzzy time concept.
There is also the possibility of the line not reflecting posts but have a fuzzy timeline . So where things are more popular the time can stretch out to more details. Where posts are less popular one unit on the time line can represent more posts.
This could for example break time into units of equal number of views / likes. Managing scrolling in that way.
I am definitely warming up to āshow me my explicit bookmarks in the timelineā. Particularly on a long topic, there ought to be some way to navigate via time breaks or explicit bookmarks directly.
The other thing Iād really like to see is a marker for my last read post. So if I enter a topic via a link to a specific post, I can easily jump to the new stuff.
brainstorm!
. So where things are more popular the time can stretch out to more details. Where posts are less popular one unit on the time line can represent more posts.